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Comment by shadeless | Hacker News Reader

This article made me realize that I don't know of any open source startup which got acquired for a significant sum of money.

Can you name some that did?

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There was Cygnus Solutions, which I believe maintained GNU software (debugger, binutils) and contributed large parts of gcc. Cygnus was bought by Red Hat for $674M in 1999.

HN folks may recognize EFF board member John Gilmore as the founder.

And also Michael Tiemann (now at RedHat), and David Henkel-Wallace (now at Technical Illusions, making CastAR).

Their slogan was "We make free software affordable". (In answer to the anti-slogans: "Free software: more expensive than money" and "Linux is only free if your time is worthless".)

I asked David if they named the company "Cygnus" after grepping /usr/dict/words for "gnu". He answered no, because if they'd thought of doing that, they would have named it "Wingnut".

Funny, but "wingnut" doesn't actually appear in /usr/dict/words

The funniest thing is that David shot that back without missing a beat, with a perfectly straight face, and a somber tone that suggested he deeply regretted the missed opportunity.

Did you know that the word "gnullable" wasn't in /usr/dict/words either?

Yup, because I took 0.2 seconds to actually grep /usr/dict/words for "gnu" just recently.

I think Gumby was either making a self-effacing joke, or a gratuitous dig at RMS -- I'm not sure which.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wingnut_%28politics%29

"Wingnut" (sometimes "wing-nut") is an American political term used as a slur referring to a person who holds extreme, and often irrational, political views usually with a religious overtone. According to Merriam-Webster, it is "a mentally deranged person" or "one who advocates extreme measures or changes : radical."

Cygnus were the go-to company for GCC/GNU related work for hire, like doing compiler toolchain and support for your new embedded platform/new cpu. Even the name was a recursive acronym, like GNU: "Cygnus, Your GNu Support"

I was at Cygnus (and still at RH). The total deal value was actually much higher because it was a stock deal and the Red Hat stock price kept climbing before everything was wrapped up.

JBoss; acquired by RedHat for $420M in 2006 (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/JBoss_%28company%29)

$2.7 Billion dollars: snort -> sourcefire -> Cisco

http://www.networkcomputing.com/careers-and-certifications/c...

Sourcefire significantly clamped down on the openness of Snort. Pushing out new versions with less-free licenses, and changing the alert format regularly.

NB: I'm not saying they were wrong for this, because they've got to make money.

JBoss by Redhat, $400m.

SpringSource by VMWare, $382m.

SuSE Linux AG by Novell, $210m.

Trolltech (Qt) by Nokia, $153m.

That's a very limited definition of "fail". If a company opens it's product, runs successfully for years, builds something people actually use, and eventually shuts down leaving a legacy of a piece of useful software, then that isn't really a failure.

The investors would probably consider that business to have failed, in the sense that their gamble didn't pay off, but that's their problem. We don't have to think like investors.

It's a failure if any founders or employees took equity in lieu of significant salary.

Within the past year I had the experience of "oh, you wrote X? We used that all the time at my last company!" "So will you hire me." "No."

MySQL, 1 billion USD (2008).

By Sun Microsystems http://web.archive.org/web/20110718044718/http://mysql.com/n...

They bought it out yes, but the guy forked it and now develops MariaDB, which a few OS' have switched to after the Oracle take over. I'm sure he's enjoying still working on his project.

A valuable lesson to those buying OSS companies with the intention of destroying the competition to their core product.

There's another side: IF the company does a great job, the OSS project becomes much more fruitful, however, if it doesn't do much of a great job, well you end up with MariaDB vs. MySQL and LibreOffice vs. OpenOffice (not sure they haven't bothered to merge).

At least the GNU does what it was intended to do, stop companies from hijacking / buying out a software product and getting rid of it entirely.

I hope they never learn that lesson.

Phineas Barnum was right and we can use the money better than Larry Ellison.

At least, we can use it to build nice things for everyone to enjoy.

A valuable lesson to those buying OSS companies.

It's a lesson for those who want OSS companies for the wrong reasons.

I am quite sure had Oracle agreed to fund the development of MySQL into the Oracle RDMS killer it may eventually become, the fork would not happen.

If I were Monty, I'd try to sell MariaDB to Larry Ellison for a billion dollars.

www.gluster.org - https://www.redhat.com/promo/storage/press-release.html - $136m

XenSource --> Citrix $500 million

Zimbra --> Yahoo $350 million

Sleepycat --> Oracle

Revolution Analytics --> Microsoft

Cannot speak to the $$, but CUPS was purchased by Apple[1]

[1] http://iphone.appleinsider.com/articles/07/07/12/apple_acqui...

The problem here might be that those startups, at the time they got acquired, were not perceived any more as startups.

Look at what RHEL acquires

RH acquires non open projects very commonly. It's after they start the acquisition that the closed products go open source.

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